"To Save Harvard"

"Resignations are threatened. Rumor and suspicion, bickering and ill-will are rampant throughout the entire faculty." Harvard's President James Bryant Conant read this disquieting outburst last week in the Harvard Progressive, leftist student monthly. The Progressive exaggerated, but Dr. Conant well knew that the Harvard family was in a quarrelsome mood.

In the last few years, loud have been the critics--both faculty and student--about the way Dr. Conant handles men. One after another, popular young teachers have been fired, from Economics Instructors John Raymond Walsh and Alan R. Sweezy two years ago to Art Instructor Robin D. Feild last spring. Basic reason for the firings was a slump in Harvard's income from its investments, resulting in a tighter budget. But facultymen complained that President Conant was a budget autocrat, that he used a slide-rule formula in dealing out money to the various departments. Students grumbled because they believed Dr. Conant was bent on getting crack research men instead of crack teachers, because he hired big-name scholars at fancy salaries while he let brilliant young instructors of undergraduates go. Harvardmen began to think that Chemist Conant was more adept at test-tube work than at human equations.

Last spring Harvard's faculty hoped for reform in Dr. Conant's hiring & firing policies when he adopted a "Magna Charta" drafted by a faculty committee (TIME, June 5). But their hopes were quickly dashed, for at term's end the University fired ten popular assistant professors, including Ernest Simmons, President of Harvard's Teachers Union, and Critic Theodore Spencer. (Professor Spencer thereupon landed a lifetime appointment at Cambridge University, was hired back by Harvard as visiting lecturer for a year.)

For these firings, President Conant was taken to task by the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and the Teachers Union. When Professor Harold Hitchings Burbank, head of the economics department, quit the University, the campus believed he did so as a protest, although he denied it. Last week there were other open protests besides the Progressive's, which cried that the "strange case of the assistant professors" was "more disquieting . . . than the cases of previous years. . . . Harvard education itself is at stake. . . . The disregard for undergraduate teaching, the attack on faculty security and morale, the flouting of academic democracy ... are now demonstrated to be permanent fixtures of university policy."

Prominent undergraduates formed a "Student Committee to Save Harvard Education," got an approving send-off from the Crimson. Meanwhile Harvard's entire faculty began to hold extraordinary sessions behind closed doors to debate the affair. Conservative Harvard sentiment was summed up by Mathematics Professor Marshall Harvey Stone, son of U. S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone: "I believe the situation now existing is unhealthy to the point of gravity. . . ."

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